Toyota partners with Autogreen
Tuesday 10th March, 2015
This is only the beginning
It's a sad day when you send a much-loved car off on its final journey to the scrap yard. But now many of its parts – from tyres to copper wires – could have a whole new life.
Every year some two million cars are scrapped in the UK, enough to fill the new Wembley Stadium 20 times over. That creates two million tonnes of steel, rubber, plastic, glass and fluids to be sorted and recycled. It's a massive logistical and environmental challenge. While making cars more fuel efficient is one way to make them greener, the way they are built and how they are recycled are just as important. As well as cutting the amount of waste going to landfill, this can help conserve precious raw materials.
The European Union currently demands that 85% of a car is recycled, and that figure will increase to 95% in 2015. It's crucial that this is done in a responsible way, which is why Toyota has a network of more than 150 approved dismantlers, operated by its partner Autogreen, that follow the European End-of-Life Vehicles (ELV) Directive. When the sad day comes to say goodbye to your car, they will take it away at no cost to you and treat it with the same care that you did when it was new.
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Fluids
These can pose the most serious threat to the environment by contaminating the water supply, but Toyota dismantlers don't spill a drop. Fuel is filtered and used to power the recycling plant's machinery; oil, coolant and hydraulic fluids are cleaned up and reused.
